Cohen Jack - Heaven

Copyright 2004 by Joat Enterprises & Jack Cohen

All rights reserved.

Aspect

Warner Books

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

Aspect name and logo are registered trademarks of Warner Books.

First eBook Edition: May 2004

ISBN: 978-0-446-56091-7

By Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen

Fiction

WHEELERS

Nonfiction

THE COLLAPSE OF CHAOS

FIGMENTS OF REALITY

THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD (WITH TERRY PRATCHETT)

THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD II: THE GLOBE

(WITH TERRY PRATCHETT)

WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE?

Nonfiction by Ian Stewart

CONCEPTS OF MODERN MATHEMATICS

GAME, SET, AND MATH

THE PROBLEMS OF MATHEMATICS

DOES GOD PLAY DICE?

ANOTHER FINE MATH YOUVE GOT ME INTO

FEARFUL SYMMETRY

NATURES NUMBERS

FROM HERE TO INFINITY

THE MAGICAL MAZE

LIFES OTHER SECRET

WHAT SHAPE IS A SNOWFLAKE?

FLATTERLAND

THE ANNOTATED FLATLAND

Nonfiction by Jack Cohen

LIVING EMBRYOS

REPRODUCTION

PARENTS MAKING PARENTS

SPERMS, ANTIBODIES AND INFERTILITY

THE PRIVILEGED APE

Everything that man seeks in the world: someone to bow down before, someone to entrust ones conscience to, and a way of at last uniting everyone into an undisputed, general and consensual ant-heap, for the need of universal union is the third and final torment of human beings.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

The order that emerges in enormous, randomly assembled, interlinked networks of binary variables is almost certainly the harbinger of similar emergent order in whole varieties of complex systems. We may be finding new foundations for the order that graces the living world. If so, what a change in our view of life and our place must await us.

Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe

Memeplexes are groups of memes that come together for mutual advantage. Once they have got together, they form a self-organizing, self-protecting structure that welcomes and protects other memes that are compatible with the group, and repels memes that are not.

Susan Blackmore, The Meme Machine

Identifying with other creatures feelings is only one part of the problem. The more important question is, how can you make effective use of your knowledge of what they are feeling? Emotions are straightforward. Motivesthose are quite another matter. And without an understanding of motives, there is no true empathy, no predictability, and no power.

Archives of Moish

T he lion-headed Neanderthal woman sat at the end of the pier, dangling her feet in the sea to cool them... but her mind was elsewhere. Usually, she was composed and carefree, but today she was troubled by an apprehension to which she could not put a name.

She shook her thick mane, trying to clear her head. It was a beautiful day on a beautiful planet, and everything was right with the world.

For a few moments, she almost believed it.

Small wormlike animals circled around her toes, occasionally probing her skin with thin tubes, only to withdraw as soon as they sensed alien biochemistry. There was no nourishment here, and the ancient evolutionary bargains were null and void. Newcomers arrived, made the same mistake, and retreated in their turn, baffled. The woman laughed, a gravel-throated chuckle: The worms tickled, and she liked that.

Her trading name was Smiling Teeth May Bite. Her friends called her May. Her enemies could call her what they wished. To both, throughout the Galaxy, she and her kind were lion-headednot literally, but because their ocher skins, their flamboyant sunbursts of marmalade hair, and their wide noses gave them a decidedly leonine appearance. In Mays case, the effect was enhanced by tawny eyes and a tendency to snarl.

She wore a short olive green tunic, cut diagonally to leave her left shoulder bare. Several small packages were arrayed around her waist, as if hung on a belt, but with no visible means of attachment. Precursor technology, like most inexplicable things in the Galaxy.

A pair of hand-woven sandals, which she had picked up the previous year on Nothing Ventured, lay next to her at the piers edge.

She was waiting for a sail. Not any sail, but a particular one: lateen-rigged in a motley patchwork of colors, torn and repaired many times. She redirected her gaze from the swarming worms to the haze where sea met sky. The motion was graceful and haughty. There was an economy to her movements that made her powerful frame seem always perfectly balanced. She sniffed the air laden with the characteristic smells of rotting algae and salt dust; her eyes flicked to left and right, instinctively noting every movement.

She could see a few sails on the horizon, and more of them closer to the port, but none were the sail she was waiting for. Despite her uneasiness, she laughed again, this time in amusement. Second-Best Sailor was late. As he had been last year, and the year before, and would be next year. The reason was always the same. His route would take him along at least three foreign coasts and through several of the innumerable archipelagos that infested No-Moons world-girdling ocean. At some point of his voyage he would be distracted by the dubious attractions of one of the more exotic ports, find himself behind schedule, and try to invent a shortcut to catch up. Then, entirely predictably, he would be thrown off course by the Change Winds.

May knew this, and she also knew why he was called Second-Best Sailor, and that meant that there was no point in trying to make him see sense. So, as she did every season, she had left extra time in her schedule for him to find his way into port from wherever his latest episode of irresponsibility had led him. He would turn up soon... unless his boat had sunk. But he was Second-Best Sailor, not Thousandth-Best. He would never allow his boat to sink.

She didnt mind waiting. She liked the port and the natural sea breezes, just as she liked being immune to the depredations of the carnivorous worms. It made sense to hang around for a few more days until Second-Best Sailor turned up. The trading would surely be up to expectations.

Would it not?

A foot scuffed the timbers of the pier, and without turning her head May knew that her companion had returned from her foray into the maze of narrow floating walkways that constituted the above-water part of Isthmus Port.

I have reregistered our credentials with the Trade Authority like you told me, the newcomer said. Her voice was in a slightly higher register than Mays, but her orange mane was just as luxuriant and her nose was, if anything, even more like a lions. Her eyes were an improbable royal blue, exactly the same color as a species of electric eel on one of the hubworlds where Neanderthals often traded. The coincidence had given rise to her trading name of Eyes That Stun the Unwaryusually abbreviated to Stun.

Her tunic was a deep, dusty purple. She was accompanied by a fat, goatlike creature on a braided lead. A yullclever but not sentient. The animals were bred in a variety of shapes and colors, and this one had a dramatic pattern of large and small spots, black on gray.

There were many Neanderthals in the ports of No-Moon, and following habits laid down thousands of generations ago, most of them kept pets. Over the centuries, their unique empathic sense had allowed them to tame several dozen species, from as many worlds. May, a rare exception, didnt keep any pets on No-Moonland animals occasionally upset the customers. But back on board Ship, she had quite a menagerie.